The Keys To Successful Market Research

When you’re conducting market research, it’s important to be aware of what you’re looking at and looking for. The more you’re ready in advance before you start your research, the more likely it is that your research will be accurate.

• Define Your Problem – When you start conducting market research, you need to first define the problem and identify the objective of the research that you’re trying to accomplish. Knowing these things in advance will be helpful.
• Design the Project First – Think about all the questions you may have and how you’ll get the answers. Some you’ll be able to get via primary research, others via secondary research. Will you use a focus group, a survey or something else?
• Know What Question You’re Trying to Answer – When you start researching, you need to have a list prepared of the questions you want to answer before you even start. This is going to help direct the research that you do.
• Look for Official Sources – The best thing to do is to look for government data, trade publication data, and industry data from reputable sources. Your sources are the most important aspect of your information because they will determine whether or not your research is accurate.
• Start with Secondary Research – It seems strange, but the best research to start with is secondary research which is research that’s already been conducted. Find out what answers you can get from other people’s work first. Then use those results to inform your primary research.
• End with Primary Research – After you’ve done your secondary research, it’s easier to design your primary research in a way that will get the best results. The results you need will depend on the questions you have so far.
• Collect and Combine the Information – Once you’ve collected all the information you need in the methods you’ve chosen, you need to put it all together and combine it. A lot of market research is both creative and scientific, and it’s best to use both. You don’t want the research to be stifled.
• Analyze and Present – As you conduct your research, always remember and keep in mind what you are looking for as the end result. How you plan to use the information matters a great deal. Is it going to be used internally or externally?

When you conduct market research you need to know what to look for, and the way that starts is that you know what you want the end result to be. You know what questions the research will answer and how you’ll use it.

Tools to Help You with Your Market Research

When you start conducting market research, you’ll need to collect a few tools of the trade. Thankfully, today there are so many automated tools to help you conduct market research like a pro at very little cost, and in some cases even free.

• Typeform.com – This is a beautiful form creator that you can use to collect information from your audience in an easy way and post them right on your social media accounts. There is a free and paid version. It shows only one question at a time, which can help encourage your audience to finish. You can even accept payments via your forms if you want them to sign up for something after finishing your survey.
• Survey Monkey – This can be used free, or you can upgrade it to get more features. But, you can do a good survey with the free version for up to ten questions and 100 respondents. So, if your audience is small you can get a good enough sample with the free version. There are wonderful analytic features with this software.
• HeatMapCo – If you want to know what your audience is doing and looking at when they use your website, this is a great type of software to help you know how to improve your online real-estate and get the best engagement from your visitors.
• Facebook Insights – Included with your Facebook business page, you can use their Insights tool for free. It will tell you the demographics of your viewers, the breakdown of your audience by interest, and much more.
• AWeber – Your good old autoresponder service can be used to deliver any survey, questionnaire, or request for interviews to your audience. If you don’t yet have an email list, take some time to build one, because having an active email list will help you with your market research exponentially.
• Google Insights – You can use Google Insights Databoard to help you explore a lot of information. Use that info to create custom infographics, which can help you understand the information that you’ve researched.
• US Census Bureau – Using the information you can find via the US Census Bureau is the best way to find secondary data which can help you figure out where to find the audience to collect primary data.
• Personapp – You’ve heard that you should create personas that represent your target audience, and this app will help you do it even better, using real life stats. Being able to visualize your audience can help immensely.

Conducting marketing research is very important for the future of any business, because it’s the only real way to know for sure what your audience wants and needs. If you’re not sure who they are, you can’t be sure about what they want. Doing market research will answer all of those questions for you. Using the right tools will make it easy to do.